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The e-drive project team launched the Edinburgh Wave Systems Simulation Toolbox during a workshop led by Dr Richard Crozier at the International Conference on Ocean Energy in Cherbourg, France on June 14th. The software has just been released as an open source tool with full documentation and is available on: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rnfoundry/

The Edinburgh Wave Systems Simulation Toolbox is a new toolbox primarily designed for the simulation of wave energy converters. The toolbox also contains more general purpose components useful for simulating a wide range of systems, including electrical machines, hydraulics, advanced multibody dynamics, and, naturally, wave interaction. The simulation system is also optimised for batch processing and optimisation tasks run on servers. The code is based in Matlab, but also capable of running in the free alternative, Octave.

These tools include the following.

Multibody Dynamics Toolbox

Preprocessing, simulation and post-processing of mutibody dynamics systems (e.g. mechanical systems with masses, joints and other constraints). This is based on a new interface to the MBDyn multibody solver. MBDyn is also capable multiphysics simulation of systems with hydraulics, electrical components, wind turbine aerodynamics (via
aerodyn) and more.

Nemoh BEM Solver Toolbox

Nemoh is an open source hydrodynamics BEM solver. A new Matlab/Octave interface to the solver has been developed to ease the creation of the hydrodynamic data needed for wave interaction simulations.

Wave Interaction and Wave Energy Converter Toolbox

A toolbox for transient simulation of wave-body interaction. Also has an advanced interface for the simulation of wave energy converter systems which eases the developement of the mechantronic aspects of the the system, such as the power take-off, for which it integrates closely with the multibody dynamics toolbox described above. Features tools derived from WEC-Sim (a wave energy simulation developed by Sandia National labs in the US), but converted such that Simulink and Simmechanics are no longer a dependency.

The wave interaction toolbox also has the capability for multi-rate simulation such that the fast moving/changing components of the system (such as the electrical generator) can be simulated at a smaller time step between each larger time step of the slow moving hydrodynamic simulation to greatly increase simulation speed when high fidelity in all components is also desired.

Dr Richard Crozier at the Software LaunchExample output animation from the toolboxDr Richard Crozier at the Software Launch